The one time of year when, like your favorite public radio station, I ask you to open your wallets and dig deep to help keep Southern California’s leading source for bike news and advocacy coming your way every day.

Except unlike your favorite public radio station, we don’t block most of this site to make you pay up.

It started as a joke four years ago — hence that whole 4th Annual thing. But the funny thing was people actually took it seriously, and wanted to give their hard-earned money to support this site.

Which surprised the hell out of me.

Thanks to donations from people like you — along with the generosity of our sponsors, and a very understanding wife — I’ve been able to turn BikinginLA into a more than full-time job. And devote whatever time I have left in this world to doing whatever I can to make the streets safer for people on bicycles.

Which takes us back to that whole dig deep thing.

You can contribute with just a few clicks by using PayPal. Or by using the Zelle app that came with the banking app that’s probably already on your smartphone; just send your contribution to ted @ bikinginla dot com (remove the spaces and format as a standard email address).

Any donation, in any amount, is truly and deeply appreciated. And will help keep the Corgi in kibble while keeping this site up and running.

If you can’t afford to give anything, or just prefer not to, that’s cool too. You’re more than welcome to keep coming back, and contributing to our online community.

Either way, thanks for taking a moment to consider it. And thanks for visiting this site.

Because it doesn’t matter what I write if you’re not here to read it.

Thank you to Nina M, Betsy G, John L, View-Speed Inc. and an anonymous donor for their generous contributions to this fund drive even before it officially began.

And let me offer a special thanks to Todd Rowell, who came up with the idea for a holiday fund drive in the first place.